|
Home > Museum Shop > Books & Media > Old Virginia
 Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal
Price: $40.00
By William M.S. Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton
To some commentators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the term "Old Virginia" conjured up images of the region's proud past and traditions, of its great men and contributions to the cause of freedom, of a pastoral society governed by benevolent stewards of the land, and of an era in which society was ruled by a code of honor and decency that has largely fallen by the wayside
under the pressures of the modern world. To others it signaled, and still signals today, an economic system based on oppression and racial segregation, and an apparently civilized way of life built upon a foundation of bondage and cruelty. In Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal William M. S. Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton examine the origins of these conflicting conceptions of the region's heritage, and in the process uncover
new ways to understand Virginia's past.
Although there have been a number of studies that have taken for granted the existence of an entity categorized as "Old Virginia," to date there has not been an examination of the emergence and evolution of this still evocative designation. Utilizing period accounts, observations by travelers, commentaries by the Old Dominion's detractors and defenders, and the scores of visual images that were assembled for a major exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society, Rasmussen and Tilton discuss both the origin of the term "Old Virginia" and its remarkable adaptability to suit the political and social exigencies of the moment. Towards these ends they trace the existence of what they argue is largely an imaginative construct from its first use as "Ould Virginia" by Captain John Smith in 1624, to its rise in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a manifestation of the attempts by Virginia landowners to create a version of the much-admired pastoral society of England, to its use as a weapon by those who wished to maintain the status quo in the years before and immediately after the Civil War, to its myriad twentieth-century incarnations.
The authors delve beneath the competing mythologies of Old Virginia as either a bucolic world of moonlight and magnolias or an infernal region of suffering to examine the attempts by the Virginia gentry to create and then defend a pastoral sphere in which the pursuit of virtue and honor was one's greatest ambition. In this effort they deal attentively with slavery, both as it was practiced and how it has been remembered. Conversely, they point out the continuing attractiveness of the society that in the eighteenth century produced enlightened philosophers and patriots, who proved so popular during the Colonial Revival that an entire city was restored so that modern-day tourists could view this community firsthand. Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal makes an important contribution to our ability to evaluate a past that in many ways continues to impact Virginia's present.
252 pages, softcover, ISBN 1574271393, Howell Press, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2003
|
